Introduction

Apple’s CFNetwork documentation leaves a lot to be desired. At one point while figuring out how to use it, I believe I went on a rant where I described its contents as “vicious lies”. Now that I’ve actually figured it out, I’ve revised my opinion. The documentation doesn’t lie, exactly. It omits. And what’s worse is that I couldn’t find anything on the Internet which told the entire story. So, I’m using this blog post to try to fill that gap. With a little bit of luck, Google will find me. And with a lot of luck I’m not posting incredibly inaccurate information here. So. Caveat: I’m still learning OS X programming. Don’t take this as gospel; take it as a good place to start. Also, I’ve removed all error checking for brevity. You’ll need to add it back. Good luck. (We’re all counting on you.)

I’m going to talk about sending a very basic HTTP post request to a server which authenticates with NTLM and then reading the response data. My example makes the request synchronously (because my application currently makes the request synchronously). You could modify this to use threads, or you could use polling or run loops. I’m not doing any of these, but I believe the ideas are basically the same. Refer to the documentation for more details.

The basic strategy is:

Build a CFHTTPMessageRef containing the HTTP message to POST

Send it to the server

Read the response back from the server

See if authentication is required

Create a new CFHTTPMessageRef that looks exactly like the one created in step 1

Add authentication credentials to the new CFHTTPMessageRef

Send it to the server

Read the response back from the server

Repeat steps 4 through 9, as necessary

Retrieve the HTTP body from the server’s response and hand it off to the caller for further processing.

In higher level frameworks (like Microsoft’s .Net or even Apple’s NSURLConnection), a lot of these steps are done for you. Indeed, if you don’t need a feature of the CFNetwork stack, I highly recommend using NSURLConnection. Unfortunately, NSURLConnection cannot do NTLM authentication. So if you’re talking to a Windows web-server that’s expecting domain-level credentials, you’re stuck. It’s not so bad, though.

Build a CFHTTPMessageRef

This is easy enough that I’m just going to point you at the code:
-(CFHTTPMessageRef)buildMessage
{
NSURL *myURL = [NSURL URLWithString:@"http://myurl.com"];
NSData *dataToPost = [[NSString stringWithString:@"POST Data It Doesn't Matter What It Is"] dataUsingEncoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding];

Send it to the server and read back the response

Once there are no more bytes available, copy the kCFStreamPropertyHTTPResponseHeader property from the stream (This is the part I can’t find in the documentation: reading bytes from the stream won’t actually give you everything. The read stream keeps the HTTP response header bytes for itself and makes it available as a property. This is entirely unintuitive, especially since the documentation insinuates that you can append the bytes from the read stream onto an empty CFHTTPMessageRef to get the response. You can’t do this, because reading the bytes from the stream doesn’t give you everything you need. :( Also, you have to copy the property from the stream after you’ve read all the bytes. Otherwise, it might not be there. Again, none of this is in the documentation (or, if it is, it’s hidden. I couldn’t find it after a few weeks of searching.))

Use the bytes read from the stream AND the information from the kCFStreamPropertyHTTPResponseHeader to actually construct a CFHTTPMessageRef containing the response

Adding Authentication to an HTTP Request

I’m going to skip to step 6 for a moment, just so I can use this method in the next step (which combines steps 5 – 9 in a single loop). This is actually pretty simple (the only wrinkle is that you HAVE to use CFNetwork code and can’t use NSURLConnection) so I’ll skip to the code.
-(void)addAuthenticationToRequest:(CFHTTPMessageRef)request withResponse:(CFHTTPMessageRef)response
{
CFHTTPAuthenticationRef authentication = CFHTTPAuthenticationCreateFromResponse(NULL, response);
[NSMakeCollectable(authentication) autorelease];

Putting It All Together

Now, we’re going to actually make the HTTP request in a loop. The loop will let us see if we need to authenticate. (Since good HTTP authentication uses a challenge-response mechanism, you have to make multiple requests. It’s a shame the libraries don’t wrap this up for us…) Once we have a response back, we’ll get the body and use NSLog to print it to the console.

//An HTTP status code of 401 or 407 indicates that authentication is //required I use an auth count to make sure we don't get stuck in an //infinite loop if our credentials are bad. Sometimes, making the //request more than once lets it go through.
//I admit I don't know why.

In Conclusion

I hope that was both clear and helpful. I tried to keep my commentary to a minimum because I’m a better coder than I am a writer (though, I’m not a particularly good coder when it comes to ObjC and Cocoa/Carbon). I wrote this inside a WordPress edit window so I could keep formatting mistakes to a minimum; but that means I haven’t actually compiled it. It may not work as presented; but it should be enough to get you the jist of what to do.